I'm curious others thoughts on when (or perhaps if) this supply issue with chips and GPUs comes to an end. I have to think it will at some point, but I don't follow PC stuff much.
Reasoning is I'm trying to solve a dilemma. I was about to sell off my old Radeon card, I only replaced it because the fan was noisy. I fixed the fan, then got distracted and let it sit in a drawer. Now I'm in drawer clean out phase. So I put it in my PC to test it. The thing is, it is still more than enough graphics card for me and I've got a friend offering me $100 more than I paid for my GTX 1660 in December 2019. I think they are fucking insane myself (it's not even a good card), but the prices check out when I look online.
So, I'm thinking about selling it, because I'm pretty much only a couch/TV/console gamer. I may convert to PC and build a totally new HTPC when my Xbox wears out it's welcome, but we are talking 2023-ish. I can't imagine I'd even want a GTX 1660 in 2023. Do we think it will still be impossible to get hardware by then?
I have no special knowledge except from what the supply chain people at my employer have said regarding shortages and how they are (attempting to) manage them. Do with this information what you will.
Supply chains have gotten really "lumpy" as opposed to the Just In Time supply chain that has been the way things have worked for the past 30-40 years. Since the shortages have increased the uncertainty around being able to obtain certain parts when they're needed, companies have started buying and taking delivery of a lot more of the parts and warehousing them in a way they haven't really done for quite a long time. So where a company might normally buy and take delivery of X parts, now they're placing orders for X * 10 so they have some buffer to be able to handle a future scenario where they can't get the parts in a timely manner but still have to make their deliveries.
In the short term this means there's going to be shortages because companies are buying way more than they need, and basically every company is doing this to some extent; so you have this severe over-reaction to the shortages that ends up prolonging the shortage. It's basically like what happens when someone slams their brakes on the highway: the driver behind does the same thing but a little bit more so, and the driver behind him but a little bit more, and so on until you've created a traffic jam a mile behind the initial guy who slammed his brakes.
The hope is that over time this will smooth itself out again, as companies make fewer (larger) orders and start to use their inventory and manufacturers produce more parts to build up their own inventory. But of course we've never turned off a global economy before, so who knows if what they hope will happen will actually happen.
That would be true in my work too. The stuff I buy isn't really things a consumer would use, but we've sort of been piling it up a bit to the point our supply chain is getting thin. That's not super unusual in my industry though, as it's all specialized tech stuff so often times they just don't plain predict and manufacture enough of it.
We have a mixture of consumer and specialized. The thing we're really getting nailed on is custom cables: the supplier has gone from a 30 day lead time on certain cables to a 6 month lead time. Hence why orders are 5-10x as large.
Inflation is here to stay. All prices are going to go up when they restock the whatehouses with goods built with input materials at the new inflated prices.
Keep your hands on all real assets you can. Invest in materials, mining, energy (when lockdowns end...or if), and real estate. Do not hold cash except during the sell off during the impending market crash heralding in the recession.
I wasn't even poking at inflation, more hardware lifecycle and a GPU being a depreciating asset, but I like your point in the grand scheme anyway as it's spot on.
I've been on a massive spending spree this year. Not buying useless shit, just trading cash for assets. I was looking at my plan for the rest of the year and at year end I will have less cash in the bank than I think at any point since about 2015. By a large margin. My 2021 goal was to reduce cash down to just what I'm comfortable with as a minimum and maintain it there. Don't add to it but invest in other things. I've probably had my hands in about anything that could be considered an investment this year.
California is banning high power personal computers, it's price will only go up.
How do they plan to enforce that? If it's anything like my blue shit hole's retarded high capacity magazine ban it's mostly there to impede people who are unwilling/unable to do the bare minimum to get around it.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s still dumb. Linus tech tips had a video explaining it. It’s essentially based on efficiency of energy use over actual energy use. So a high end machine with a crap power supply could be banned but same machine but swapped with a more efficient power supply could be ok. Like I said it’s dumb and overly wordy, but the only company I can remember being hit with it hard was dell/Alienware. Enforcement would essentially be not allowing companies to ship to addresses in the state for those products or face fines (similar to trying to buy a magazine that holds more than 10rounds and shipping to California. The store will cancel your order and not ship it so they don’t end up in a CA kangaroo court.
If that were true, then prices would only go down, for lack of demand from California.
Just like the prices went down for automatic rifles, and the prices went down for refrigerators that use Freon, and the prices went down for toilets that can actually flush, and the prices went down for incandescent lightbulbs...
Retard, if something gets banned, the demand doesn't go away, the prices just go up.
That's not at all related.
Those items were banned entirely, not just in one Marxist-Feminist coalition shithole.
only long as demand is on point consumers are more than happy to spent
When crypto dies...so never.
Saying that, I think I read that AMD and Nvidia are working on dedicated mining chips to get GPUs back into the hands of people who will use them properly.
I found the article
That would make sense for them to do. I actually wonder how that changed, because just a few years ago you mined with those ASICs for mining or it wasn't worth the trouble. Just the value increase I guess.
I'm leaning toward what seems like taking a sucker's money to me. It's not like I've got one of the desirable RTX cards or something I might want if I leave Xbox eventually. In the meantime a graphics card will not make my 2014 PC build a desirable gaming machine.
Yeah, I found the article about it.
https://archive.vn/CZ2oZ
You should definitely sell. The next-gen consoles will have higher stock levels soon, I think, you could just jump straight to a Series X.
Especially with Steam going woke and Epic being...Tencent.
Series X would be the other option too. So far I still like one One X--actually more than I expected as I figured we'd be awash with games I couldn't play by this fall. Doesn't seem that that will be the case.
if mt memory is not malfunctioning too badly wasn't one of their solutions a lock-out chip/code like on some consoles that was beaten by dummy plugs a beta driver and a few after market mods
these people will never learn all anti piracy stuff does is hurt the end user the same will be true with this stuff and folks will seek ways to bypass it and others will get rich selling pre-jailbroken stuff or its components to diy
PoS (winner-takes-all) crypto is for even bigger suckers.
As I understand the major producers of silicon are California and Taiwan.
California is a shithole and doing business there gets more expensive by the day.
Taiwan is on the edge of being taken by China. If that happens, you can be assured all supply will become local only.
I think there will be a temporary reprieve in the shortage as the market settles, barring further transport delays from vaccine mandates. However, long term it will become apocalyptic after China flexes her donger.
I had a friend that went and lined up at Best Buy a month ago at 3AM as they had a shipment of cards coming in and got a 3080. Sold his 1080TI for more than he paid for it 4 years ago...
That just seems totally bonkers to me, but whatever the market will bear.
When they announced the 2080's and the price of the 1080's crashed I was able to pick up one used for $325. I could sell that for twice what I paid for it today.
Not until after WWIII.
Not until the crypto bubble bursts.
The dissolution of national currency in favor of an internationalist fiat controlled by banking cabals should be a HUGE red flag to people.
Instead, they only see dollar signs.
We simply just deserved everything that came after.
Not for another year or two, imo. TSMC and Intel are building new semiconductor fabrication plants in AZ, and maybe demand may die down a bit by then. As someone else said, companies are overbuying to prevent shortages, and in a sense, creating the shortages they are trying to avoid.
Spoke to someone that works at HP/Arista(solutions architect type position) at work recently, he said that it will potentially go into 2023 due to backorders for stuff constantly stacking up. I didn't ask him for sources or anything like that considering it was a casual work conversation but I think it seems likely, lead time on gear we need for work is up to 180 days on some pieces so its obvious that it's impacting a ton of sectors of tech.
From what I’ve heard it could be a couple of years before the supply chain gets back to its pre 2019 status
Toshiba recently told stockholders that they don’t expect to be able to fulfill all of their customers orders until 2023
Probably never. Most chips come from Taiwan, if/when China kicks off an invasion the shortage of silicone chips will reach critical levels.
It is said it is already ending.